d the pole had commenced.

The new life was bitter and difficult and as their resources were
depleted so also did their numbers diminish.

[Illustration]

Huddled at their last retreat the Rell watched the ever smaller ice cap
annually diminish and lived with the knowledge they faced extinction. A
mere thousand years more would see even this trifling remainder gone.

Oh, you might say there was hope ... of a sort. There might be Rell in
the northern hemisphere. The canals girdled the globe and a similar ice
cap could well exist at the opposite pole. Rell perhaps survived there
also.

But this was scant comfort. The fate of the Rell in the South was
sealed. What hope of any brighter future for those in the North? And if
they survived a few hundred thousand years longer ... or if they had
perished a similar period earlier, what actual difference did it make?

There was no one more aware of this gloomy future than Raeillo/ee13.

In the old days a single unit of the group-mind of the Rell would have
possessed but a single function and exercised this function perhaps a
dozen times during his life. But due to the inexorable shrinkage only
the most important problems now could command mind-action and each unit
had been forced to forsake specialization for multi-purpose endeavors.

Thus Raeillo/ee13 and his mate Raellu//2 were two of the five thousand
units whose task was to multiply in any group-mind action involving
mathematical prediction. Naturally Raeillo/ee13 and Raellu//2 did not
waste their abilities in mundane problems not involving prediction. Nor
did they divide, add, or subtract. That was assigned to other units just
as several million of the upper groups had the task of sorting and
interpreting their results. Raeillo/ee13 and Raellu//2 multiplied only.
And it must be admitted they did it very well. It is a pity the Rell
could not have multiplied physically as easily as Raeillo/ee13 and
Raellu//2 multiplied mentally.

With the exception of an occasional comet or meteor the Rell were seldom
diverted by anything of a physical nature. The ice cap was their sole
concern.

But one afternoon a rare physical phenomenon was reported by a bank of
observer Rell.

"In the sky's northwest portion," an excited injunction came through.
"Observe that patch of flaming red!"

More observer Rell were quickly focused on the novel sight and further
data was rapidly fed into the interpretive bank.

The Rell were justifia